His Thoughts Were Red, And His Teeth White
by KhamanV
Summary: When Richard is sent an unsettling letter, it's left to Ben sort things out. Nobody said he couldn't take a little holiday...


His Thoughts Were Red Thoughts, And His Teeth Were White

Benjamin Linus sat primly in the warm, womblike dimness. It had taken his eyes moments to adjust, assisted only by the faint gold gleam of the antique desklamp. Books lined heavy wooden shelves – a variety, a cacophony of ideas. Here, the obvious Freuds and Kinseys, Jungs and Skinners. There, a rush of Philip K Dick, Bronte, Spiegelman's 'Maus,' and a worn-spined copy of Watership Down. His eyes lingered on that one a moment, feeling a touch of weary humor. It would always come back around.

There was a woman seated across from him, behind a slender, humble desk. The books were tended, the little curios of world travel honored, the desk an afterthought, floating amidst a handful of oddly arranged, mismatched, extremely comfortable-seeming chairs. It was one of these he had taken, a regal number with carved wooden armrests and a soft seat of dark burgundy. He knew what the woman would make of the deliberate choice. It amused him. He held few illusions of real grandeur. But it was nice to pretend.

She smiled at him. Nicolette Margrace, top of her trade, a graduate of Johns Hopkins. The smile, he noted with some unsettlement, was genuine. That was not something he encountered often. She inclined her head towards him politely, a slender neck and a plain, oval face made remarkable by bright jade eyes that held many smiles. He flicked his gaze away before she spoke, setting his attention on a set of certificates and pictures framed on the wall to his left. He examined one with internal distaste. Charles Widmore, her sponsor, and primary employer. His expression did not alter.

"I'm sorry for the wait, Mr. Linus. My prior appointment needed a little extra attention."

"Quite all right," Ben murmured, in even tones. He dropped his gaze from the photographs and returned it to her. "The scheduling was abrupt. I'm sure you're accustomed to a more organized manner of business."

"It seemed urgent." She leaned forward slightly, placing her hands on the desk as if to make plain that she hid nothing, and feared nothing he might say. "So what brings you to my office?"

"I came to kill you."

* * * *

Mail, on the island, was a regular and uninteresting occurrence. The usual files and reports would make their way to Ben in due time, and he had no personal correspondence. If the submarine had no incidents on its journey, then it was left to others to handle. He took the day, this one at a nominal winter's end, at peace, near the dock, with a book. This one was written by an African game hunter, a man named Capstick, who had passed away fairly recently.

Ben was well into a chapter on poisonous snakes when a soft curse was uttered up the beach. He looked up and noted Richard's stormy expression with private delight. He'd come to appreciate the rare moments the seemingly unflappable man was knocked sideways, despite the fact that these moments usually meant extra dirty work. It meant there could yet be surprises in a fated universe.

He noted the letter held in Richard's hand. The man's dark-lined eyes narrowed at it, jaw set in displeasure. No doubt Ben would hear about it later – if not within moments if he didn't make some attempt to avoid it. As noiselessly as possible, he slipped a bookmark into place and rose from his chair. He hummed a few random notes as he disappeared inland, heading towards his home.

Avoidance lasted only a few brief hours. Dinner – taken alone, again. Little Alex had snuck off with some crisp bread and cheese and a handful of books. He noted the fingermarks she left in the wheel of Roquefort with exasperated acceptance and had done for himself with an only slightly more ornate meal of a sandwich and a mango.

Richard, _always timely, _he dryly observed, had made his way into Ben's home just at dusk. The letter was pinched between two fingers, as if it might rise and bite.

"Widmore," was Richard's first word. He didn't particularly need another. The letter was handed to Ben, who read it carefully and then dismissed it, sparing some mild admiration for the homework applied to its contents. Some of it even rang true, and painfully so. Nonetheless...

"It's barely a parlor trick, Richard. So he has a pet who put together a nice string of words to try and run a head game. We've managed better on bad days." Ben's voice held a lilt of amusement, mostly at the cost of Alpert's distress. The letter was signed by an N. Margrace, and detailed both a theory of long-term (decidedly so!) derangement in Ben's advisor, and a casual once-over of loneliness issues and crafted near-sociopathy in himself. Every armchair consultant loved to drag out a good daddy issue, he noted absently. Maybe there was even some weight in this one. He didn't waste much on introspection these days, it led to brooding. There'd be enough time for that later. He looked up from the letter to Alpert's tense face. "What would you like me to do about it?"

Never ask a question one doesn't really want answered. Ben would have to arrange himself passage on the submarine by the weekend, and then a flight.

* * * *

Nicolette's expression altered not a bit. No twitch, no passing jerk of surprise, not even a blink, save for a perfectly ordinary one after the moment had passed. Just the same unsettling, friendly smile. "I appreciate the advance notice."

"I didn't say I would, just that it's what I was here for. You did ask."

That drew a laugh from her. "The letter. I didn't think it'd draw quite that much reaction."

"Yes, you did." Here was familiar territory. He smiled back, a small one, tight-lipped, as near to genuine as he allowed.

She dropped her gaze to a notepad before her, and leaned back, pulling her hands into her lap. "You're right, I hoped to draw you out. You won't leave the place on your own impulse, I had to try something. Both factions are completely off their fancy over this."

Ben tilted his head at her, as if peering over his reading glasses. "Rather pointless." He didn't elaborate past that, nor did he expect her to ask him to clarify what he meant. Her knowledge of Alpert via Widmore meant she would either know better or did not entirely understand. Both were presently irrelevant.

"Mmm. Could be it is. Meanwhile, more important things – to me, at least." She grinned again. "You arrive and announce intent. A nice gambit, I am informed, and now, maybe at ease with the idea of even letting you in, as I am ready and alert. And now you say you won't – confidence game. Who's to say you won't turn around again later on?"

"I wouldn't presume to promise otherwise; if you were smart, you wouldn't believe me."

"Precisely. And I don't – but nor do I think you will kill me today."

He flashed the thin-lipped smile. "You're actually enjoying this."

Nicolette dropped her gaze again, her smile faltering as she rustled a drawer. "Tell me one thing."

"Maybe."

"And maybe it will even be the truth?"

Ben arched an eyebrow, then lifted the shoulders in a shrug. That in itself was a truth from him.

She rifled through a manila folder, thick and heavy with information. "Do you hold emotion for what you do? Not just a reaction for when people are known to be observing, but do you actually hold any care?"

Pointless and personal. Ben should have been bored by it, but it still held that unsettling tinge of truth that the letter had shown. He frowned, realizing that the letter had built a foundation for her to work from. That she knew that he would realize this, and that any answer would lead to some unwanted slip of information. The best path would be now to rise and leave, silently.

Instead - "I'm not sure I have an answer for that." Again, a rare truth. "For one, I always assume to be observed."

Nicolette visibly relaxed. "If you simply said yes, I would have been more concerned." She gestured at the folder. "Besides, that goes with what I've gathered."

Now he absolutely should leave, but he was curious. "Oh, do share the rest of it."

Green eyes examined him, then detailed a brief biography of his known youth, his involvement in The Purge and the death of his father, and his handling of young Alex. "It's a matter of entrapment. You perceive yourself as caught within a web that needs careful tending. That every choice leads to a predetermined set of choices, leading to actions that are _not_ ethical or moralistic by normal standards, but here we are. They must be done, else worse is believed to occur otherwise."

"Ah. God tells me to do it, or else." He didn't bother to leave out any sarcasm from his tone.

"Let's leave out theology in favor of fear of temporal distortion."

"Can you really distinguish the watchmaker from the watch in this scenario?"

She eyed him. "It's still a distraction."

Ben's tone became waspish. "You might note in your files that while it might be believed that things occur as they _must_, I don't feel any less responsible for what I do or what I will do." Enough, he'd pushed it for curiosity's sake, if he wasn't going to do the job today, then it was time to leave. Ben rose from the chair. "I didn't come here to be analyzed or find forgiveness." He shot the last over his shoulder as he turned to go.

"What about understanding?"

_That_ paused him. He measured out a cautious response. "There are things I do that aren't right, not by any common sense, and I'm under no illusions that it will change any time soon. I do what I do because someone must." He shook his head. "For those things I am responsible, but I don't lay awake at night. But there _are_ things I have no doubt I will go to hell for." He gave her a grim look. "I'm only human."

The door shut noiselessly.

* * * *

Margrace found him at the palazzo he was staying at, a day later. Not that he'd hidden his tracks particularly well – Dean Moriarty was not his most solid pseudonym. Ben had a vague interest in seeing what she'd do. He remained unsettled – understanding was not something he had thought he actively looked for, but then it was in rare supply on the island. But he did manage to appear unsurprised when he went downstairs and found her wandering idly around the cortile. He did not announce his presence, nor begin with a greeting. Instead he asked, "Why Florence?"

Nicolette didn't turn around immediately. Instead, he received his answer, in perfect Florentine Italian. "It is the birthplace of beauty and monstrosity, so intertwined that you cannot say one is the face and one is the mask." She continued in English. "It fascinates me, the mesh of human and inhuman, and both capable of such extremes. You know of Il Mostro?"

Ben recalled it – as infamous as Jack here in Florence, and unknown everywhere else. The case had been publicly laid to rest at last only a few years prior, placed at the feet of a rude and somewhat unlikely farmer. It struck him as unfinished, and he remarked on it as such.

"I happen to agree, but it won't matter to the carabinieri." She gave a faint shrug. "A journalist I spoke to privately has another theory, but he won't detail it. I think I know what he would say, but I won't press." She turned and gave him another guileless smile. "It's unwise to speak too much of it, except that as Jack shaped the dark heart of London, so Il Mostro has - not shaped, but brought Florence's own dark heart back into the light.

"And yet I do not find it irredeemable."

"I hope you don't presume to be the one to save it from itself." Dry amusement.

She surprised him with a sharp laugh and an abrupt directness. Italian again. "God, no. I'm only human."

Ben had asked her to dinner, in the Florentine fashion, where meals ran late and bedtimes far later. If her acceptance surprised him, he showed none of it. The conversation was pleasant, idle, at first taking fields far away from controversial matters more in common. She was solidly American, with a family that tended towards the eurocentric, and it had been one of their travels that had first brought her to Italy, where she knew she would remain.

"I was twelve, I had seen Tuscany and all its glories and its flaws, and I had already had my first scrape with Stendhal syndrome. Knocked my head in the Palazzo Vecchio and knew I'd never really leave." She tossed back a final taste of wine and shook her head.

Ben glanced up, admiring a fresco that had probably gleamed down on one of the great masters. Absently, he replied, "Roughly around that age was when I saw my dead mother for the first time. Same response, really." He blinked once, and furrowed his brow.

Nicolette watched him for a moment, then gestured for the waiter to refill their glasses. When the waiter departed, she left hers untouched. Ben took the opportunity to work through half of his, then met her gaze again, his face properly blank. They passed time in a silence that eventually moved from awkward to a kind of conciliatory peace.

* * * *

They passed a few nights in similar fashion, one dinner spent on a lively argument of the relative worth of current fiction, and marked only by the occasional, gentle prod at the armor of his psyche. At first, she never made it clear whether she was accepting their intellectual truce out of real interest in him or interest in what made him tick. It was, Ben thought, also irrelevant. It was Florence, he was not under the island's eye, and it left him with a vague taste of what real peace might be like. The last thing he might ever get that could resemble, even passingly, a vacation.

Of course, eventually, the conversation took a more aggressive turn. "You could walk away," she opened. That drew a halting, unfamiliar sound from him, something he finally recognized as a real, honest laugh. She leaned back, the string of garnets she wore catching candlelight's flicker like a fire on a drop of blood. "The island will be through with you someday, you know this. And you'll know the moment it occurs, there will be no mistaking it, no matter how hard you might try to turn it around. After that, the likeliest route out is feet first."

Ben looked away, watching others, watching a couple laugh carelessly at some trifling wit, watching, always watching, just in case of danger. "This is not news."

Nicolette seemed puzzled. "Then why not do-"

"Because there _is nothing_ to do about it. That is the absolute core of everything!" He finished his wine, placing the glass down more sharply than he had meant. He frowned. "Time will come, as you say it will, and it will be because things _happen_ as they _need to happen._ If they don't happen this time, they will next time – or the next – until it is done the way it is needed."

Frustration gave her tone an edge. "In any other circumstance, this conversation would have just tilted right into-"

Ben cut her off again. "No, it's madness in this circumstance, too, the game is staying sane while it all goes on." He waved a hand dismissively. "You had it right at the first – understanding? That is a rare enough thing that it has my attention. So understand. It is not going to alter, it can't. As for the rest of it, there is nothing. No forgiveness, no peace, none of that, until it is over, and it is not for me to ask for." He lapsed into silence, watching her warily. She dropped her eyes and nodded.

"I can still hope for a better outcome."

"Oh, well." That drew a wry smile. "Hope is a cheap commodity, can't hurt to stock a little of it."

Nicolette sighed and tapped her still full glass with a fingernail. "For what it's worth, I do understand. Mostly because I've been in a position to see the other side of it."

"Widmore's side." Displeasure in his voice.

"Well, yes." She shrugged. "Doesn't mean I wholly take that side, either."

It was an opportunity to cultivate someone inside Widmore's circle, it was plain. An asset of critical value. He had no doubts that she realized his chance, and he let it pass by, unremarked on. That drew him a calculating glance, and a long one. He returned it blandly.

* * * *

It was late, of an evening now some three weeks since he'd turned up in Florence at Richard's request. Ben placed the fresh cup of tea on the bedside stand and settled himself in a small chair that he'd pulled to the side of the waking form. He tugged his robe closer around himself, for the Tuscan winter's grip was in the final throes of loosening, and watched Nicolette sit up and sip dozily at the tea. When she seemed more alert, he broke the warm silence. "You say you understand. I've accepted that without question, likely to your surprise. Now I do question – how can you understand?" His voice held no accusation, merely soft interest.

"You, of all people, didn't bother to pull up my entire file before booking that Alitalia flight?" She gave him a plainly disbelieving look.

He leaned back, working at his own cup of tea. "Of course I did." A light shrug. "Primarily your curriculum vitae, a few papers recorded in journals, and your license to practice here. Widmore did a good job keeping everything else locked up." It was again pure truth. It tasted strange in his mouth, but not entirely unpleasant. Everything had its moment, he supposed.

Nicolette sipped for a while and leaned back, contemplative, looking disturbed. It was a moment of trust for her. The sheets of his bed shrouded her body, the dim light casting deep shadows that recalled bronze statues of endangered muses. Finally she spoke again.

"I started my practice in New York, working in a clinic with some of my classmates. I had a patient..." She looked distant for a moment, then refocused. "He was obviously degrading, psychologically. His psychiatric consult had him on a major cocktail, but it wasn't reversing anything, much less helping him to resolve. I won't go into details – you know I can't – but it was a mess. It was going to be only so much longer before he broke far enough to begin hurting people. Hurting them very badly; the things he would talk about were horror.

"I have a responsibility to report suspicions to the police, of course, and of course you and I both know that often very little can be done until after something happens. Despite my warnings, and despite several frantic visits I had with his prescriber, things were gradually worsening."

He watched her, saying nothing to interrupt.

"I had to do something, nobody else would or could or tried to understand what I was going on about. He was growing dangerous. Not to me, but sooner or later... I firmly believe this, my reports on it ensured a clear trail. Only thing that kept me from jail, in the end. Well, that... and Widmore." She set her cup down and looked him straight on. Her tone was flat. "It took me less than three weeks and five visits to convince my patient to kill himself."

Ben's face betrayed no judgement. "They found out, of course."

"I explained when it came time for me to be asked. It wouldn't have been right otherwise – I accept that it wasn't perhaps truly right in the first place, but there was nothing else." She smiled ruefully. "It wasn't moral, or ethical, but it may have been right. I believe it was. In any case, his death is my responsibility, but I can't claim I want to be forgiven for it."

Ben said nothing to this, but took her cup and his away into the small kitchen. He regarded his question as very well answered.

* * * *

Two more nights passed, and now the full moon shone over spring-touched Italy, heavy and ripe, its round face gazing down on silvered fields. No room could be full dark, and it was in one of these, hers, now, a warm and inviting room in a villa in Fiesole, seated so high and so beautifully above Florence itself, that they slept. Ben woke well before dawn, well before the countryside would begin its quiet murmurs and cockerel crows. He dressed quietly and moved back and forth through her bedroom suite, disturbing nothing.

For a little while, he watched Nicolette as she slept in the moon's uncorrupted light, his face unreadable, inner thoughts not ever to be granted to another, not even the island if he felt he could help it. A shadow passed across the moon, passed across Ben's face and the moment's darkness caused a grimace to appear.

He shot her, twice. Once in the head, and another in the heart, ensuring that she would not wake, would not scream, would not feel pain. Just a peaceful dream that wouldn't end. He could hope for the same, he supposed. A cheap commodity. It didn't hurt to have a little.

* * * *

It was April 16th, spring would have started to bring flowers to the island. Benjamin Linus sat in a first class seat on an Alitalia plane to America, reading a collection of tales by Saki, rereading those he liked best, and paying closest attention to one that still stung after all these years.

From time to time he thought of pharaohs and how their servants and advisors would often die with them. The thought pleased him, though he held no illusions of real grandeur.

Ben was going home, where God could not see, and thus could not judge. He was pleased by that, too.

~_fin_

(ABC's LOST is not my creation, nor do I claim any ownership or rights to the above content beyond that of the average godforsaken fanfiction writer. All errors are my own. Those interested in Il Mostro are hereby directed to 'The Monster of Florence,' by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi, whom I casually hipcheck in the story.)

(Let's face it, ladies. Ben would kill every Mary Sue on Earth if the island said they had to go.)

(This does not stop my fascination with him)

2009/18/3 - MDS


End file.
